Bashkirs

allRefer.com, Country Study & Country Guides, May 1989

The Bashkir nationality developed from a mixture of Finno-Ugric tribes
and a variety of Turkic tribes. They were recognized as a distinct
people by the ninth century, when they settled an area between the
Volga, Kama, Tobol, and Ural rivers, where most Bashkirs still
live. Conquered by the Mongols of the Golden Horde in the thirteenth
century, the Bashkirs were absorbed by different hordes after the
breakup of the Golden Horde. Since the sixteenth century, they have
been under Russian rule. Impoverished and dispossessed of their land
by Russian settlers, the once-nomadic cattle breeders were forced to
labor in the mines and new factories being built in eighteenth-century
Russia. For two centuries prior to 1917, the Bashkirs had
participated—together with the Chuvash, the Tatars, and other
nationalities in the area—in the many violent outbreaks and
popular uprisings that swept the Russian Empire. After the revolutions
of 1917, a strong Bashkir nationalist and Muslim movement developed in
the territory of the Bashkirs, where much of the Civil War was
fought. In their quest for an autonomous state, the Bashkirs sought
the support of both the Bolsheviks and the White forces. In the end,
most joined with the Bolsheviks, and in February 1919 the Bashkir
Autonomous Republic was established, the first autonomous republic
within the Russian Republic.

The great majority of Bashkirs were Sunni Muslims. They had originally
adopted Islam in the tenth century, but many were forced by the
Russians between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries to convert to
Christianity. Most, however, reconverted to Islam in the nineteenth
century.

In 1989 over 1.4 million Bashkirs lived in the Soviet Union. Nearly
864,000 of them resided in the Bashkir Autonomous Republic, where they
made up about 22 percent of the population. The Bashkirs were only the
third largest nationality in the Bashkir Autonomous Republic, behind
the Russians and the Tatars.

The Bashkir language belongs to the West Turkic group of
languages. Until the Soviet period, the Bashkirs did not have their
own literary language, using at first the so-called Turki language and
in the early twentieth century a Tatar language. Both languages used
an Arabic script as their written language. In 1940 Soviet authorities
gave the Bashkir language a Cyrillic script. In 1989 about 72 percent
of the Bashkirs claimed Bashkir as their first language.

The Bashkirs remained predominantly rural and agricultural; less than
25 percent of them lived in urban areas in the 1980s. Although Ufa,
the capital of the Bashkir Autonomous Republic, had over 1 million
people in 1987, the overwhelming majority were Russians.